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Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus 
Illuminating the Arts-Policy Nexus is a fortnightly series of articles on the role of art in public policymaking. This series invites WPI fellows and project leaders as well as external practitioners to contribute pieces on how artists have led policy change and how policymakers can use creative strategies.
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Belinda Cooper: Revolution Redux?
I’ve been watching the news from Iran and thinking about East Germany, where in 1953, workers rose up in a popular rebellion that was rapidly and violently suppressed. Afterward, the head of the East German authors’ guild reprimanded the East German people for losing the government’s confidence. In response, poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht famously wrote, “Would it not be easier...for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”
It’s amazing how well Brecht’s words could be applied to Iran’s leaders today.
The 1953 uprising failed, but in 1989 (twenty years ago this year) East Germans—along with people all over Eastern Europe—successfully took to the streets and brought down their leaders and a whole system. While living in West Berlin and working with East German dissidents in the two years leading up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, I was able to share some of the excitement of those days, so at least some of what’s happening in Iran feels familiar.
Of course, Iran isn’t Eastern Europe and comparisons are facile. But dictatorial regimes share many features—not least of which is discomfort, even shock, when their citizens begin to show signs of independent thought. Condescending paternalism is a common trait of leaders who believe they know what’s best for their unruly children.
Part of that shock comes from finding their own words used against them. The Iranian regime, like East Germany's government, supports its claim to power with the language of popular revolution (more credible in Iran than in Germany, where the popular revolution never actually happened, but was nevertheless part of the Soviet-imported mythology). People have grown up hearing the slogans of revolution, have watched them be perverted, sometimes even cynically have used them to get what they want, and are now learning to turn the catch-phrases around to their own purposes.
In East Germany, demonstrators took up the chant “We are the people!” echoing and inverting the government’s constant invocation of the will of “the people.” In the same way, Iranian demonstrators have co-opted revolutionary slogans and behavior, like nighttime chanting from the rooftops and the color green.
It’s hard for a regime to claim that protesters using its own symbols and slogans are counter-revolutionaries or traitors. And it also reflects the fact that, at least at first, most demonstrators are not trying to change the system, but to force it to adhere to its own promises. It was not until the Wall fell that the tenor of the demands of East Germany’s protesters changed, from reforming the East German system to reunification with the West (at which point, the slogan changed to “We are one people!”).
For now, most Iranians aren't demanding a fundamental change of system, but the right to have their ballots counted. But the language and symbols come later. First, people have to come together. 
Tags: THE INDEX — June 24, 2009
Two officials at the Iranian embassy in London Read more
Amy Bracken: Haitians in Limbo
The Obama administration is trying to figure out what to do with the 30,000 Haitians slated for removal from the United States. Plans to deport them are under review, according to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—and they should be, as Haiti is unprepared for an influx of arrivals.
Already the poorest, least-developed country in the hemisphere, Haiti was pummeled by four devastating storms last August and September. Several hundred people died, a million more were made homeless, and $1 billion was drained from the already feeble economy.
With only five months in office, the Obama administration already has plenty on its plate, so it’s no surprise the Haitian migration question is not yet resolved.
It is worth pointing out, however, that the action the administration has taken thus far invites the worst possible outcome. Haitians are being deported back home at a rate of more than 100 per month, at a time when the U.S.-funded program charged with helping them resettle is on hold.
The four-month hiatus that halted deportations immediately following last summer’s hurricanes and tropical storms ended late last year, and deportees began to arrive in Port-au-Prince on commercial flights in December. In the first four months of 2009, 91 undocumented immigrants arrived back on Haitian shores. In April, 175 persons—most of whom were convicted of non-violent crimes in the United States—were flown in on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) flights.
More than 300 Haitians have already been returned so far this year and Washington has no plans to shelve the biweekly ICE flights.
According to a study released by a Haitian human rights organization, most criminal deportees left Haiti before the age of eight and lived in the United States for 20 to 40 years. Many no longer have close relations in Haiti and do note speak Creole, the national language. Deportees often consider themselves to be more American than Haitian, and most were legal residents in the United States.
Haitian criminals may deserve little sympathy, but their forced return can cause great problems for themselves, their families, and their communities. Criminal deportees (even after non-violent convictions) are stigmatized in Haiti and face huge hurdles in seeking employment and housing.
Some wind up on the streets, some develop drug and alcohol problems, some return to lives of crime, and many, unable to find work, become burdens on their families still in the United States.
This vicious cycled has not gone unnoticed by international bodies. The United Nations Development Program funded a pilot program within the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to help deportees resettle in Haiti in 2006. Later, the U.S. State Department assumed financial responsibility for the IOM program, under which new arrivals would be registered and offered counseling, education, and employment assistance. More than 1,000 people were served by the program; some now have their own businesses.
But funding to help new arrivals was provided only through March 2009. One month later, ICE flights had resumed, and deportee support had dried up. IOM officials in Haiti say they are hoping for more funding to assist the hundreds of people they expect to arrive this year. As of now, however, there are no plans to redirect money back to the program, a State Department spokeswoman said.
Meanwhile, there are some unlikely people doing what they can to help those without support: former criminal deportees themselves. 